Recharging social batteries, the sheer hell of open plan offices, escaping toYes! So much yes.

I've done that. Done that. And I've done that, too.

Recharging social batteries, the sheer hell of open plan offices, escaping to the toilets when it all gets too much, wearing headphones to discourage conversation, taking solace in solitude, a deep abiding love of books, making excuses not to attend social events to avoid torturous small talk when you have nothing to say - all of it is me.

Waste of paper. No, that's not right. That's offensive to the artists as the illustrations were brilliant, but there may as well have been no words. SWaste of paper. No, that's not right. That's offensive to the artists as the illustrations were brilliant, but there may as well have been no words. Seriously. Very little happens. At least very little that makes sense or contributes to plot progression. Only the last few pages have any real meaning with a humdinger of a cliffhanger that leaves you with multiple questions and countless theories.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

We meet Dionysus and Prince lookalike Innana. We find out some superfans believe if they kill a god then they'll absorb their powers, which isn't true for everyone except Baphomet - maybe. Ananke seems to be manipulating the gods into making themselves vulnerable enough for her to kill them. (Is she stealing their lives to maintain immortality? Or is she 'removing' troublemakers?) Ananke deliberately told Bap not to kill other gods because he alone could absorb their remaining time on Earth to extend his own life, and of course, what does Bap do? He's on Ananke's to-kill list after he takes Innana's life. Baphomet's symbolic upside down crucifixion of Innana was interesting. That and Innana's forgiving Baphomet and warning him that stealing his life force will just prolong Bap's misery. It's also hinted that Bap is the one behind framing Lucifer for the judge's death. And finally our naive protagonist Laura is bumped off by Ananke after she turns her into Persephone.

Superfan Laura being murdered during the afterglow of becoming a god came as a shocking cliffhanger. Although I'm not sure I believe she's truly gone due to the god she became. Ananke could've killed her when she was still human, so why didn't she? Persephone travels between two worlds and is separated from her husband in the Underworld and reunited with her mother every six months. Might this have something to do with it?

Taking Laura's parents' lives may have been a tactical move. Perhaps Laura's mother would take on the role of Persephone's mother Demeter. Upset at the loss of her daughter to Hades for half the year, Demeter brings on winter by withdrawing her power over vegetation growth allowing crops to wither and winter to take hold. Laura's mother may not have powers but she could turn the world against the gods after watching Ananke murder her innocent daughter.

We're told only twelve gods are remade. Cassandra turns out to be the twelfth, Urdr, the Norse goddess of fate and a seer of past, present and future as part of the trio of Norns. Notice Cassandra's name is that of the Greek prophetess cursed by Apollo to never be believed. Well, that happens here, too.

Laura is the thirteenth god. (How's that possible?) Being Persephone may explain why her presence is so readily accepted by the gods of the Underworld in Baphomet and The Morrigan since she's married to Hades, by the sky gods Baal and Amaterasu as she's the daughter of Zeus, the love and fertility god Innana as Persephone is also the daughter of harvest goddess Demeter, and finally Dionysus since she's his mother (and Zeus is his father, if you're wondering. Incest, yo!)

The Faust Act didn't exactly blow me away. I'm still frustrated with these characters. They feel shallow and superfluous. Except for Lucifer and she's dead. I miss her. Cassandra feels like Luci-lite and I'm not digging her angst. And Laura's desperation is off-putting.

Having the two characters with the most stage time whacked by the same person in the same way is repellent and repetitive. Whether you loved them or hated them, Lucifer and Laura were our main connections to this universe. By seeing the world through their eyes we grew attached to them. Who's left for us to care about?

A British setting (loved seeing the Excel Centre hosting Fantheon as they hosted fan event LonCon3 last year which I attended), a mixed race protagonist, plenty of non-stereotypical GLBT and non-white characters, vibrant illustrations and a fascinating mythology are all things I admire in the W+D universe. However, a jumpy narrative, the lack of plot progression and meaningful dialogue is difficult to tolerate.

Twelve gods, I think, were too many to adequately develop. It feels as if they're thrown into scenes or forced to converse with Laura just because they've had very little stage time and the audience hasn't had a chance to get to know them yet. This has slowed the pace of the story to plodding (I was so bored reading this) and plot threads have been too quickly resolved (who and why were snipers shooting at the gods?) which was anticlimactic or forgotten until the closing act (Laura's obvious god ability). The Faust Act did a lot more in 144 pages than Fandemonium did in 166.

Reviews of the next few issues of the comic aren't reassuring. It seems plot is completely absent in favour of telling back stories. If one of those is Ananke's then that might be helpful. Should my library purchase the third volume, I may skim it. The Wicked + The Divine's mythology is compelling but I'm not willing to waste money on it....more

As an autobiographical sequel to Fun Home, Bechdel's approach to analysing her relationship with her mother couldn't be more different to how she exAs an autobiographical sequel to Fun Home, Bechdel's approach to analysing her relationship with her mother couldn't be more different to how she examined the one with her father. If you have a problem with dry psychoanalysis, then you may struggle with Are You My Mother?

'I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity. Once you grasped that Ulysses was based on the Odyssey, was it really necessary to enumerate every last point of correspondence?'

These two quotes from Fun Home perfectly describe my frustration with Bechdel's obsession with using psychoanalysis and countless dry quotes in academic-speak to not only figure out her feelings for her mother, but to decipher her sense of self. I began to lose patience for her long neurotic struggle which saw me condemn her many times for tedious self-absorption despite obviously low self-esteem and self-hatred and a feeling of being unworthy of love, affection and praise.

Self awareness may be important for personal growth but you also have to look outside yourself in order to understand who you are and who you want to be in the future.

While bits of the psychoanalysis are spot on, things like poking yourself in the eye is just an accident, nothing more. 'Psychoanalytic insight, [Alice] Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.' I'd agree. Bechdel drives herself crazy trying to find meaning in every little detail. This only lets up towards the end when Bechdel falls back to the insertions of literary criticism reminiscent of Fun Home.

'An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a particular way. This role secured "love" for the child-that is, his parents' narcissistic cathexis. He could sense that he was needed.'Donald Winnicott

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott appears to be Bechdel's hero when it came to the mother-child attachment, so much so that her cat is named Donald. He's heavily quoted throughout and is depicted as a nice man who was amazing with children though he had none of his own.

'It appals me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed in patients . . . by my personal need to interpret. If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever.'Donald Winnicott

Winnicott's ideology frames Bechdel's insights and belief's into her maternal bond, although they didn't always feel relevant compared to the significant results of simply recollecting and interrogating the past in a basic fashion.

Alison's mother's reaction to a draft manuscript for Fun Home was not what Alison unexpected. '"...Alison is wrecking my life." She said she felt the dread she used to feel with Dad, of exposure and scandal . . . The crazy thing is I was hoping she'd say something about the writing, you know? That I'd impressed her!'

While Alison is desperately trying to seek approval and affection from her mother, she fails to take into consideration her feelings on the subject matter of her book or the fact that she disapproved of airing the family secrets in public under Alison's real name. To add to that, her mother wasn't used to the comic form as 'she thought there'd be more text and not so many drawings' and believed 'the self has no place in good writing.'

'Mom had told me that she felt I'd betrayed her by revealing things in the book that she'd told me in confidence. I'd thought I'd had her tacit permission to tell the story, but in fact I never asked for it and she never gave it to me. Our truce is a fragile one.'

By writing about her dysfunctional parents in order to understand them, Alison severely damaged her prospects of forming the type of relationship she wanted with her mother. A sad irony.

'I don't know why you can't understand me . . . Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it. I know she gave me what she could.'

Alison uses her beloved therapist Jocelyn as a surrogate mother figure to absorb the good feelings Jocelyn had about her. 'Mom and I didn't hug or kiss goodbye. We hadn't touched in years.' It's telling that one hug from Jocelyn and calling Alison 'adorable' seemed to do more for Alison than the psychoanalysis.

Jocelyn's comment, "I think your mother has some resentment about being female that got passed on to you" has some merit. Bechdel's father preferred Alison to look like a stereotypical girl, to wear dresses, have ribbons in her hair, etc. Alison rejected this aesthetic instead going for the tomboy image instead. Her mother being seen to prefer her brothers over her probably reinforced the idea that anything "girly" was bad.

Virginia Woolf's influence in having said writing about her mother in To The Lighthouse helped put her obsession with her to bed, Bechdel declares writing Are You My Mother? she was able to do the same.

Want to know the possible roots of misogyny? Bechdel seems to suggest that womb envy may be one and there's also an implication of resentment towards women for the dependence we all had on them as children.

'Some of what [Winnicott] says is very of that era. "Penis envy is a fact." But then Winnicott "reminds" the audience that "male envy of women is incalculably greater . . . We find that the trouble is not so much that everyone was inside and then born, but that at the very beginning everyone was dependent on a woman. . . The awkward fact remains, for men and women, that each was once dependent on woman, and somehow a hatred of this has to be transformed into a kind of gratitude if full maturity of the personality is to be reached."

Poet and radical lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich is another of Bechdel's heroes. 'The essay in which [Adrienne] Rich cites A Room of One's Own covers some of the same ground as Woolf's Book. Like, for example, the woman writer's peculiar challenge to cease being an object and start being a subject.' As a fellow feminist this makes me want to read Woolf and Rich.

In her struggles to write her memoirs Bechdel came across Freud's inclusion of an interesting quote on writer's block from poet Frederick Schiller.

"The reason for your complaint, it seems to me, is the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination . . . you reject too soon and discriminate too severely."

Reading Are You My Mother? wasn't as an enjoyable experience as Fun Home despite being familiar with psychoanalytical theory. As a theme, it's overused and monotonous and certainly reduces the book's appeal to a wider audience, even fans of Fun Home. Prolonged angst over anxiety, depression and writer's block made it difficult to sympathise with Alison despite experiencing those issues for myself and recognising the symptoms. Although one moment of shared history did tickle me. 'I found I could soothe myself to sleep with a fantasy.' I wonder if other writers and bibliophiles did this as children, too.

As for the drawings, there's a change from Fun Home's blue-tinged imagery to maroon. I'm unsure if Bechdel did this intentionally to represent the stereotypical colours corresponding to the gender of the parent she's analysing. In any case, the warmer colour is easier on the eye....more

Motin really needs to tone it down. Maybe it's because she's French. Nothing of this memoir appears to have been lost in translation, however, the handwriting font is illegible at times but Motin's illustrations are wonderful.

When Motin isn't showing off (boring) I appreciated her humorous frankness regarding the pressures of hair removal, her relationships with her guy friends and the realities of motherhood and the affect it's had on her body.

In some ways Motin's life is very similar to my sister's though with a little less showing off. It must have something to do with living in their respective country's capital cities - my sister in London and Motin in Paris.

If the font was more legible and the tone not quite so snobby, I probably would've enjoyed this graphic novel memoir more....more

I don't know why I bothered. The illustrations may be a little better but the disjointed and confusing short story and its implications definitely werI don't know why I bothered. The illustrations may be a little better but the disjointed and confusing short story and its implications definitely weren't for me.

Serenity's crew suddenly become filthy rich. For a while, anyway. And their 'what I'd do if I were rich' dreams were the only good thing about Better Days.

Engineer Kaylee's dream was obvious - sleeping with Simon and her own ship workshop. Doctor Simon would return to his homeworld with sister River so they can work together in a hospital. Jayne wishes to be a distinguished military captain of a ship, plus some x-rated stuff - no surprise there. Spiritual man Shepherd Book shocks the crew by saying he'd spend his riches on prostitutes, cigars and card games, but he was only kidding. And Wash dreams of a luxury cruiser to pilot and a baby with wife Zoe. I was hoping to find out Zoe's fantasy as she's a closed book but disappointingly it was never revealed and neither was Inara's .

It's implied by Inara that Mal arranged to have the millions delivered into their hands stolen from them so that his crew would remain together, because that is his dream.

A horny and impatient Jayne trying to learn from Simon how to woo a high class courtesan so he can get laid was funny and classic Jayne. And apparently Inara and Simon slept together. Awkward.

Has anyone noticed that Zoe appears to have been decapitated on the cover? Her eyes being vacant and bloodshot adds to the effect. Very odd.

Better Days isn't much better than series debut Those Left Behind. Disjointed and incoherent storytelling, no character growth and little depth make this series pointless as it adds nothing to the Firefly canon.

I seriously doubt I'll read any more of these graphic novels. It's too painful to see these wonderful characters in this disrespectful form. So much more could've been made of these comics if only Joss Whedon put in as much effort as he did with his TV and movie work. One wonders if Brett Matthews is doing all the writing and Joss is just signing off, similar to the James Patterson arrangement....more